


Borrowing Hearts

by TheXWoman



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Humor, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-11-22
Updated: 2000-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-18 10:45:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5925600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheXWoman/pseuds/TheXWoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder and Scully investigate the disappearance of Scully's shoes, resulting in a few major revelations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borrowing Hearts

"I can't find my shoes."

I don't even want to think about it. _She can't find her shoes?_ We are missing our flight because she can't find her _shoes_?

Hell, Scully.

I give a small roll of my eyes to the woman before me. Dana Scully; reserved, stubborn, doctor, scientist...

And she can't find her shoes.

Somehow, I find this somewhat comedic. Especially compared the time schedule the two of us are on. Assistant Director Kersh, our new boss now that we have been reassigned from our old section, The X-Files, permanently it seems, has decided to send us two federal agents off to, what was it? Idaho? I can't quite remember. Funny, my photographic memory seems to be failing me at this moment. Very funny, since I can tell you every event that occurred when I got my tonsils removed at the age of five but... I can't seem to remember what state we are going to.

It probably has something to do with the fact that I really don't care.

Kersh is trying to get us away from the "norm" cases of the X-files. Cases that have to do with the paranormal, the supernatural... the just downright weird. Of course, investigating cow manure is the total opposite of anything that may have come up in the X-files. And, I have a feeling that makes Scully and my superiors very, very happy.

I left the plane tickets in the car in my rush to come and grab Scully. We had been cutting it very close as it was, and now with Scully's "dilemma", I have a feeling that we just might miss that flight to... Kansas?

I am still standing outside Scully's door looking in. Scully stands before me, her hands on her hips, her face set in a frown.

"Well, Mulder, are you just going to stand there?"

I sigh and come in the door, pushing it shut behind me. Scully goes immediately back to her search, tossing about clothing and rugs and moving appliances in hope of pulling her shoes out from somewhere. I toddle behind her, in not much of a hurry to assist her.

"Don't you have another pair you could wear?"

Scully snorts out of her nose, but doesn't answer, not pausing from her dig. Typical Scully. I wander around, peeking behind shelves and furniture to see  
where they might be.

"I don't get it..." She is muttering. "I just wore them yesterday!" She stands, her small stature straight and strong, pushing her short copper hair away from her face.

"Maybe the Borrowers got them." I comment, not looking up from my own search.

Scully freezes, turning to face me. As I expect, she has her eyebrow raised, the well-known "Mulder-what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about" look plastering her pretty face. I let a tiny smile escape my lips, somewhat impressed that my comment had surprised her. Over the last seven years, one would assume all of the surprises had been leached from our arranged marriage-like relationship. But, instead, the two of us always keep the other guessing. And I believe we always will.

"Borrowers, Scully." She continues to stare at me. "Scully, please do not tell me you don't know what a Borrower is."

"Mulder, I don't know what a Borrower is."

This time, it is me who snorts out of his nose. Poor Scully. So scientific, so unbelieving. I wonder, as the memories of my childhood began to roll back, how Scully could have made it through childhood without knowing what a Borrower was. These myths and stories that made up my childhood seemed to have lacked in Scully's, and I wonder how two people who were so different could have lasted this long without killing each other.

"When we were kids, Samantha was the most forgetful child." I pause suddenly, not having realized where I was going with this story. I look up to see the  
look on Scully's face at the mention of my sister. Even though so much of our search with the X-files, our fight against the government, had been about my little  
sister, Scully has never learned much about her. She knows Samantha, but she doesn't _know_ her. Not the way I did. Not the way that, after all she has been through, she deserves to know her.

The obnoxious look on Scully's face has somewhat fleeted, and so I continue, content in knowing that she is listening. "She would get very upset, being only a little girl. So, my mother would tell her the Borrowers had probably taken whatever is was she was looking for, and that they will return it when they are done. It always cheered Samantha up, made her think that she was 'helping' the Borrowers by letting them keep her things for a while. Then, of course, whatever it was would eventually turn up and everything would go back to normal." I smile a tiny bit to myself, relishing one of the few memories I have of my sister. "Our mother used to tell us that the Borrowers lived in tiny houses in the walls, or under the floorboards, and that sometimes they need something... thimbles..." I smile, throwing a gesture at the woman before me. "Shoes. Whatever. They used them, and return them when they are done." I laugh a little, looking up at Scully. "I remember when Samantha was taken..." Shit. I'm regressing. But the look in Scully's eyes, that wonderful, kind, wanting look makes me not want to stop. Makes me think she wants to hear what I have to say.

So I tell her.

"I used to laugh at those stories, at how silly and childish they were but... when Samantha was taken, somewhere inside, I hoped it had been the Borrowers that had taken her... and that they would bring her back. Maybe if I never stopped looking, maybe if I found her somehow..." I shutter a little, that little memory, that little wish, having been lost in the back of my memory long ago. And yet, somehow, I resurfaced it with the disappearance of Dana Scully's shoes.

I am looking down at my feet, and after a long moment of silence, I look up at Scully, and we continue our search for the lost shoes. Scully is very quiet, and I wonder what she is thinking. I pause to look her over, see if I can somehow read her... but she is not letting me. Seven years, one would think we could read each other like a book. But, we don't. We only read each other when it is allowed. Right now, it is not.

It takes me a while to speak again, and by now Scully has moved her search into the kitchen, digging around cabinets. I stay in the living room, wanting to be alone. I look beneath the couch, and I am getting very annoyed over this. Scully wasn't speaking to me, her shoes were missing, and our flight left the airport ten minutes ago without us. Frankly, this whole situation is starting to piss me off.

"Scully, did you check your bedroom?" I know it is a dumb-ass question, but at this point I am getting desperate.

Scully does not answer. The noises from the kitchen just get louder and louder, until I am sure that the apartment next door is going to call the police over the racket. Suddenly, there is a loud crash that startles me, and I know there is something wrong.

I get up and hurry over to the kitchen, poking my head in to see Scully, bent over a large mess off pans, her shoulders heaving gently as she grasps a wash towel in her hand, tighter than I have ever seen her hold onto anything before. And then she turns to me, her face streaked with tears... and suddenly I can read her just fine.

And it scares me.

"I am so sorry, Mulder. I am so sorry we didn't find her."

Suddenly, my knees become very weak, and my stomach starts to do flip-flops and I start to realize that she is right... that this is the end, and we got out as empty handed as when we came in. I collapse against the doorway, staring at the woman across the room. She only looks back at me, her breath coming out in heaves, and she reaches up to wipe the tears from her fallen face.

I don't know what to do. Part of me wants to go to her, to hold her tightly, tell her it is not her fault, that we will find her, that everything we have been through will not have been in vain.

But I do not.

Instead, I turn away, my own eyes filling with Scully's tears of despair. She cannot have a normal life. She has been abducted, abused, beaten, her beautiful spirit and amazing mind put under every possible influence; kidnapping, cancer... And here we are, seven years later... with nothing.

I cannot have a normal life. My sister was taken, my life was taken. I will never be taken seriously in the FBI, my passion, ever again. I will fight and fail; I have been attacked, beaten, the Truth waved in my face and then snapped away without a second thought. I can no longer trust, no longer love. I have only Scully left and she... I have lost her now as well. She is not the Scully that walked into my basement office and told me that aliens couldn't exist. That Scully is dead. All we are now, are shells of the people we used to be.

We are lost souls searching for a lost truth that shall never be.

I find myself in Scully's bedroom. I can smell her in the air; what she has become. The innocence that she has lost.

I can smell her tears.

I glance around, looking for something to hit, to hurt, to yell and scream at. But all that I can find are a pile of suitcase bags on one wall, but I take the offer. I kick them, tear them away from their home by the wall and fling them away from me, in some futile effort to make me feel better. And, soon I have made a horrible, pointless mess and now I am seated on her bed, in the mess of her room, smelling Scully's tears mixed with my own.

I am a murderer; a murderer of spirits, of minds, of souls. I have robbed Scully of hers; and me of my own.

"Damn you, Scully." I hear myself whisper. "Why couldn't you have just gone and been a doctor."

It is then that I realize I can feel her behind me, and I shut my eyes, cursing myself as I had her. She would never know I didn't blame her... just as my sister would never know I didn't blame her either. I didn't blame my father, my mother... I blamed myself. Not for Samantha's abduction, or Scully's disappearance and cancer, or my father's death. But for the fact that, afterwards, I couldn't even successfully keep their memories, their souls, or their spirits alive. I blamed myself because I had failed in the only quest I had been given. To find the Truth.

She comes beside me, and I reach for her, as if she is the only thing I have left. And she is. She accepts me and sits beside me, and I hug her fiercely, my head buried into her chest as I sob, not wanting to ever let her go, in fear that I shall lose her forever. She hangs onto me, my head grasped in her hands, and suddenly, I hear it.

Her heartbeat.

My tears cease, and I listen to the gentle murmur of her heart against my ear. It is strong, hard, stubborn; much like she is. And I don't need to see her heart to know what it looks like; broken, torn apart, used... all of the horrible things that has ever happened to her scratched into her being, the only thing that makes her real, alive. But, yet, it beats, strong and loud and it tells me that, no matter what, it will continue on. It beats for this moment, and it will beat for the next, and I know that well. And I hear the song it sings, and I believe the words it says.

And again my tears fall upon a tortured heart, but a heart that I love with all mine, that I will give my life to. And as she holds me, I understand that, somehow, I am not the killer I so thought I was. As long as Scully's heart beats, as long as she stands by my side, I have not lost her. And, I have not lost Samantha, or my father. They continue in me, for the Truth does not need to remember them. I do. And as long as they live in my memory, they also live in Scully's. And, as long as they live on in Scully, as long her beating heart echoes through my body and her own, and sings to me, they shall live on forever. They shall live on until the end of time.

"Oh, Mulder." I hear her say. I pull away and look into her face, but her eyes are cast across the room, to the corner where the suitcases lie. I follow her gaze, a tiny smile erupting over my face at what I see lying there.

Her shoes.

She turns back to me and she smiles, and I understand now. Our search is over, and we have found what we were looking for. And, that is the game of life.

We must continue to look. For those who turn away and give up never find what they are looking for, but those who continue to seek will find.

"I guess the Borrowers are done with them." She says, and stands to gather her toppled shoes. I watch her move, as she stoops to pick up the black heels and then she stands, in that mess of suitcases, shoes in hand, just looking. Like a flower growing in garbage dump. "I wonder how they got over here..." She muses, turning her eyes to me.

And, I understand more, through the eyes of this woman. I am not a murderer. I do not rob those of what matters most to them. I am simply a Borrower, and I take what I need to continue on. Scully's heart will continue on for her, and I will borrow it, to help me. Help me move on myself, until I can finally find a heart of my own.

She smiles at me, as if she knows what I am thinking, and glances back for only a second. Suddenly, her body freezes ridged, her eyes widen. I leap up quickly and rush to her side, and she looks to me, then back at the floor.

"Mulder, look."

I do, and I see it. One tiny, tiny shoe, lying discarded on the ground, under the mess of suitcases. I crouch down, inspecting the shoe closer. It is no bigger than my fingernail, lying on it's side, a tiny black shoe that looks like it is made out of a little piece of thin leather. I look back up at Scully, who is clutching her shoes to her chest tightly. And, suddenly, I have to laugh to myself. I remember how I used to laugh at Samantha for believing in these things, and suddenly I realize that wherever Samantha is she is laughing back just as hard at me, for not believing. And I suddenly know how Scully feels, for I, a Borrower, have borrowed her soul for just a second.

And, suddenly, I can understand why sometimes, she does not believe.

I stand, grasping her hand, and we leave the little shoe untouched. I have my theories, and I know that Scully has her own but, for once, we will not discuss it. For, there are some things that cannot be discussed.

And the borrowing of shoes and hearts are among them.


End file.
